We havenäó»t heard a whole lot lately about beacons, those small transmitters merchants were supposed to station in their stores to beam offers out to customers as they were passing by or browsing in the aisles. So we decided to run a story this month on the matter to see …

Open-loop financial-services prepaid cards will be one of the fastest-growing segments for prepaid over the next two years, predicts the äóì12th Annual U.S. Prepaid Cards Market Forecasts, 2015-2018,äó recently released by Mercator Advisory Group Inc. The report, which gauges the growth potential of both open-loop and closed-loop prepaid cards, also …

Portfolios of independent sales organizations are bought and sold with fair regularity, but a deal that closed as 2016 dawned begged notice because of who the seller was. Merchant processor First American Payment Systems L.P. bought the ISO portfolio of Chase Commerce Solutions, the merchant-acquiring and payment-processing unit of banking …

Swedenäó»s online-payments firm Klarna started operations in the United States only five months ago, but already it is making itself felt in the highly competitive business of serving U.S. e-commerce merchants. By early January, nearly 20 retailers had signed up for the companyäó»s streamlined checkout service, including big sellers Overstock.com …

Consumers seem to be very forgiving of retailers who experience data breaches, according to findings from a recent survey for the Merchant Acquirers’ Committee, a trade group of payment processors. Most customers resume shopping—and using a payment card—at a breached retailer within a few months, and among those that don’t …

To the extent there is greater mobile-payments use among merchants and consumers this year, that increase will likely bring with it a greater potential for fraud. That’s the cautionary note from Fair Isaac Corp. executive T.J. Horan, vice president of fraud solutions at the analytics-software company. In-store mobile payments will …

Processor Total System Services Inc. (TSYS) is buying acquirer TransFirst Holdings Inc. for $2.35 billion, Columbus, Ga.-based TSYS announced Tuesday. The deal, which is expected to close in the second quarter, puts an end to TransFirst’s plans to explore an initial public offering. Hauppauge, N.Y.-based TransFirst last October filed an …

Payments-technology provider ACI Worldwide Inc. said it plans to sell its Community Financial Services (CFS) unit to bank processor Fiserv Inc. for $200 million in cash. CFS, which provides online and mobile banking and payments and security services to community banks and credit unions, generated about 22% of ACI’s $1.02 …

E-commerce merchants and the payments companies providing them with merchant services have reason to be both happy and disappointed with the 2015 holiday season. On the one hand, merchants handled the voluminous number of e-commerce orders by using their physical stores to fulfill their online sales. The volume of these …

While consumer acceptance of mobile wallets has been painfully slow for wallet developers such as Apple Inc., new survey results from the nation’s largest mobile carrier show consumers are quite willing to use mobile apps in some form to buy things. Some 23% of smart-phone owners last year used an …